Walker Percy - Love in the Ruins - The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

Did I dream it or do I have a recollection of Willard Amadie bending over me, his Santa hood pushed back on his shoulders like a Carmelite’s, his face no longer farcical but serious and tender but also risible in his old style. “—If you ain’t something now,” did he not say, bending over to pick me up and seeming in the same motion to adjust my clothes before Dusty came up.

So it was not even a great scandal but just enough to allow the possibility that Dusty could have been offended, though perhaps not, and the possibility that my name was dropped by the medical society, though perhaps it wasn’t. I did receive the anonymous Hippocratic oath, however. But I was in love and Lola was not my patient at the time.

Dusty saved my life, finding me without breath, shot me full of epinephrine, helped Willard carry me home, where he, Dusty, put a tube in my nose and stayed with me until I came to myself.

All this, if you can believe it, in less than an hour’s time from the moment I hoisted the first gin fizz until I opened my Chinaman’s eyes in my own bed.

Christmas Eve fell out thereafter as planned. With the last of my strength I pressed the button on the headboard and saw Perry Como’s Christmas show after all.

There came Perry, seventy years young and snowy-thatched but hale as old Saint Nick himself, still wearing his open cardigan, color off a bit, face orange, lips violet, but all in good 3-D.

He sang Silent Night sitting on his stool.

It was during the following week, between Christmas and New Year, that I became ill, suffering simultaneous depressions and exaltations, assaulted at night by longings, succubi, and the hideous shellfire of Verdun, and in the morning by terror of unknown origin. One morning — was it Christmas morning after listening to Perry Como? — my wrists were cut and bleeding. Seeing the blood, I came to myself, saw myself as itself and the world for what it is, and began to love life. Hm, better stop the bleeding in that case. After all, why not live? Bad as things are still when all is said and done, one can sit on a doorstep in the winter sunlight and watch sparrows kick leaves. So, hugging myself, I stuck a wrist in each armpit like a hobo, squeezed the arteries shut, and walked to Max’s house. Max mostly sewed me up without making much over it, fetched a surgeon to suture a tendon, and at my request allowed me to commit myself to the federal hospital.

Going to see Max. Is the sniper following?

As I walk across the pool apron, powdered by chlorine dust and littered by dirty cakes of Styrofoam, I try to collect my wits, badly scattered by memories of Lola and by Dusty Rhoades’s plans for me. Lola did not come to see me in the hospital. But perhaps she returned to Texas A & M without knowing I was ill.

Two things to do today — no, three things: (1) see Max Gottlieb, who knows the value of my discovery, and ask him to speak to the Director about sponsoring my article in Brain and my application for funding from N.I.M.H.; (2) complete arrangements for a trysting place at the ruined Howard Johnson motel for my date with Moira on the Fourth; (3) go to my office where, undisturbed by patients or my shrewish nurse (it is Saturday), I can put the finishing touches on my article, sip a toddy or two, listen to music, and watch the martins fly home in the evening.

Shortest and safest route is by foot. Across the fairways of the old 18 waist-high in Johnson grass, past the old Bledsoe house, a streaked Spanish stucco from the thirties, in the dogleg of number 5. Here for fifty years lived the Bledsoes, locked in, while golf balls caromed around the patio, richocheted off Spanish balconies and window grills.

Clink clink. Clink clink.

A great thunderhead hides the sun, but it is dry on the fairways. The anthills are abandoned, worn away to a comb of cells.

Clink clink. Clink clink.

Stop and listen.

Someone is following me. But there is no sound but the whir and snap of grasshoppers.

Clink clink.

There it is again: a sound very much like — yes, the very sound my caddy Willard Amadie used to make when he’d hump it for the angle of the dogleg to watch the drive, running level and flat out and holding the clubheads in the crook of his arm so they wouldn’t rattle and disturb the drivers already poised over their balls, but even so the faces of the irons would slap clink clink.

There is no one. I stop on a high bald green dotted with palmetto. The flagpole flies a pennant of wistaria.

Now into a dry wash out of bounds and among the flared bladed trunks of tupelo gums. Clink clink , it’s ahead of me.

Stop and calculate: really it seems unlikely that anyone is trying to shoot you here or even following you or, if he is, that he would be carrying a golf bag.

Nevertheless, suppose that he is. Suppose he has seen me and, knowing me, knows where I am going and is going ahead to wait Where would he go?

One place: the “island” of number 11, a sporty hole where the drive has to carry a neck of the swamp, which the golfers cross by two Chinese footbridges connecting a little loess lump in the swamp. Here I’d cross if I were going to the Center and here on the island stands a pagoda shelter that commands both bridges.

Instead of using the bridge, drop down the soft cliff, using a boy’s trick of walking along the face dropping two steps for every step forward.

Now behind the “Quarters,” a long rowhouse, a ruin of soft warm brick which housed sugar-plantation slaves and which, set just above water level on the bayou, was thought of by the Paradise developers as a kind of Natchez-under-the-Hill and so restored and reroofed for domestic servants, even a chapel added so that strains of good old spirituals would come floating up to our patios in the evening, but the domestic preferred their Hollow, dank and fetid though it was. So back to the jungle went the Quarters, new tin roof and all.

A crashing in the vines ahead of me. My heart stops: if it is a sniper, there’s an army of them. Wait. Yes, whew. I spot Colley’s pith helmet and Gottlieb’s fishing cap. It is the Audubon Society, on the trail of the lordly ivorybill.

Moving swiftly in deep shade and without sound on the moss bank of the bayou, I reach the hogback of the island, high and dry now, and climb its gentlest slope, angling for the path and keeping an eye peeled for the roof of the pagoda.

There it is, directly above, but the loess loam, soft as meal, has eroded badly under the near quadrant of the pagoda so that one may no longer walk into it but has to climb up through the vines. Thunder rumbles. A big sour drop spatters on my hand. The wind smells of trees. It is a simple matter to climb into the quadrant, put bag on seat, hold pistol, stand on seat to see over the partition.

Is anyone there?

The two adjacent quadrants are empty. The opposite quadrant? It is difficult to see because the angle between partitions is choked with potato vine and dirt-dauber nests. The space between the eaves and the intersecting rafters allows a view of a stretch of the coast with a church steeple and parade ground. There the Kaydettes are drilling, the sun is shining. By a trick of light and distance, the field seems to be tilted like an Andes farm. Tiny figures march up and down. The twirling batons make silver coins in the sunlight.

Safe in the thunder and wrapped in potato vine, I wait The wind is sour with raindrops but the storm is veering off.

In a brief quiet between thunder rolls, close as close, a man clears his throat So close that I feel my head incline politely as if he were addressing me. In a panic I grip the center post and hollow my throat to keep breathing quiet